Quantum anthropologies: Life at large Vicki Kirby

Reviewed by: Myra Hird, Queen’s University, Canada

I first encountered Vicki Kirby’s work in the 1990s as an academic working in New Zealand, when a colleague suggested I read Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (1997). At that time my research was focused on gender theory, and had taken a poststructural turn following Judith Butler’s (1990) highly influential performative theory of the gendered production of sex. Up until then, my writing coincided with social constructionist formulations within feminist theory, best captured by Simone de Beauvoir’s (1959) often-quoted statement, ‘one is not born a woman, but becomes one’. In Telling Flesh I encountered familiar philosophies and theories (feminist theory, critical theory, linguistics, cultural criticism, phenomenology), but read in provocatively unfamiliar ways. Kirby was exploring corporeality, but not conceptualised as an effect of text. By the time I read Telling Flesh’s analysis of lightning as communication between non-human entities in which, with a single lightning strike, ‘an entire field of energy rewrites itself’ (Quantum Anthropologies, p. 12), I was hooked. My attention subsequently turned to the work of feminist scholars grappling with tricky questions about corporeality and representation, and their epistemological and ontological implications. In a previous review (Hird, 2009a) I examined Kirby’s Judith Butler: Live Theory (2006) in conversation with the material feminist interventions of Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Elizabeth Wilson, whose work examines the traditional Kantian-inherited nature/culture binary. In this previous review, I examined the criticism material feminism has attracted from feminist scholars who contest claims that feminist theory ever actually disavowed corporeality as matter. In this review of Quantum Anthropologies, I take up the opposite critique, that some feminist theory privileges a particular corporeality (within an ontology of sexual difference). This critique is a recurrent and important theme within Kirby’s work as a whole.

Quantum Anthropologies is a deceptively short text. Within its covers is a densely packed, highly detailed, and sophisticated treatment of foundational questions concerning origins and causes. Beginning with continental philosophy, linguistics and feminist poststructural inquiries into the cultural production of nature, this book examines the foundational supposition that culture and nature are separate systems. We find this supposition in discussions of, for instance, representationalism. The preface outlines Kirby’s aim to address fundamental questions vexing critical theory: does language describe objects that have an autonomous existence, or does their representation create these objects? And what of the human? Do we occupy a privileged position in the inscription of ourselves as linguistic authors of nature?

The first chapter begins the work of addressing these questions through a distillation of anthropology’s modus operandi of determining causality through culture. Rather than follow the well-travelled Actor Network Theory route outlined in Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Kirby (re)turns to Jacques Derrida’s work on language, speech, and text. She does this, in part, to illustrate that philosophy has forfeited the implications of its own insights by circumscribing its analytic frame to culture as its single term of reference. Quantum Anthropologies’ starting point is Derrida’s famous dictum ‘no outside of text’, and its well-rehearsed interpretation within philosophy as excluding matter from culture. Throughout the book, Kirby stays with Derrida’s writing as a material object itself; turning it over to examine its every surface, and then excavating its interiority to finally argue its meaning to be the opposite to that traditionally given. Derrida, Kirby argues, is arguing there is no outside of nature.

Chapters Two and Three stay with Derrida’s writings, now read alongside Husserl’s phenomenology, addressing the pre-eminence of language within cultural theory through a provocative discussion of forensic science and mathematics. Within feminist and cultural theory, these are fairly unfamiliar topics with which to consider language, especially mathematics, which, as Kirby notes, we tend to ‘quietly leave to … its own practitioners’ (p. 49). Kirby begins with a conundrum Derrida articulates with regard to knowledge: since we understand the world through language, nature is forever out of reach, or as Kirby writes, ‘misunderstanding is always a factual horizon’ (p. 36). By questioning a privileged human position as somehow outside of or external to the world, Kirby argues the human has no more (or less) restricted access to the world than any other entity: ‘the genesis of humanness’ Kirby argues, ‘would be an internal articulation of and within’ nature (p. 39, my emphasis).

As such, Quantum Anthropologies untangles discussions of epistemology from both subjectivity and representation. The book is filled with provocations: principally that we are entirely unused to discussing the possibility of nature’s representing itself, of non-human entities engaging in a language that would itself participate in cultural constructions of the world. With others (see for example Harman, 2009; Clark, 2011), Kirby applauds Latour’s persistent reminder that the world is made up of assemblages of human and non-human entities. But these ‘unseen masses’ seem to depend upon a human witness to, and reader of, their assemblages, associations, and networks. In this regard, Kirby’s research has stronger affinities with speculative realist accounts, which remind us that interpretation and representation are not only issues for humans: all non-human entities are also hard at work sensing, interpreting, and representing the world to themselves and each other (see for instance Meillassoux, 2010). I believe a conversation between feminist science studies and critical theory, speculative realism and object oriented philosophy is overdue. Kirby’s provocations about non-human communication, agency, and objectivity precede some of the insights speculative realism and object oriented ontology are now making. Interestingly, Kirby’s argument for opening up what has traditionally been considered exclusive to humans – language, reflection, and so on – is echoed within such fields as microbiology where research on bacterial communication, community organisation, sociality and even sentience offers highly stimulating empirical findings that critical theory might productively engage with in arguments against the understanding of culture and nature as separate systems (see Hird, 2009b).

What Kirby is driving at here is our tendency to think only humans write (and speak) the world. ‘Why is it so difficult’, she asks, ‘to concede that Nature already makes logical alignments that enable it to refer productively to itself, to organize itself so that it can be understood?’ (p. 85). Rather than argue Nature somehow requires human translation of its complexity – that Nature, in other words, does not interpret itself – Kirby suggests we generalise our supposed capacities of language, agency and so on to Nature itself and its own ability to understand itself and be understood.

Chapters Four and Five bring these arguments to their logical culmination, and provide the real crux of Kirby’s intervention into the culture–nature debate. Unlike in the previous chapters’ close consideration of mathematics as language, in chapters Four and Five feminist and cultural scholars will likely find resonance in Kirby’s discussion of the culture–nature distinction, and her positioning of this debate as a core concern. With years of feminist writing devoted to arguing for culture’s production of nature, Kirby’s reversal – ‘What if Culture was Nature all along?’ – may well incite deep suspicion. With much feminist and cultural theory, Kirby insists on the impossibility of language and perception’s autonomy as each is implicated ‘through a web of sticky associations’ (p. 70) to each other. Given this, Kirby argues, it cannot be the case that culture produces nature because culture would need to be autonomous, to exist before its relations with other entities. Put another way, without recourse to representation’s limits on access (discussed in previous chapters), how could culture have preceded nature? Here Kirby draws upon her long conversation with Karen Barad’s (2007) theory of entanglement and agential realism to argue for culture and nature’s inexorable relationality. Drawing upon insights from quantum theory, Kirby argues that culture and nature are not two systems that somehow, on some occasions, and in some circumstances, ‘get together’. They are entangled. Kirby describes this as ‘keeping faith with [Judith] Butler’s … focus on just one system’ (p. 97). Culture and nature are not implicated or ‘chiasmically involved’ in each other because this would mean their initial separation. Nature and culture are never given, then, because they are not static but are created anew as entanglements of, to refer to the subtitle of Barad’s popular book, ‘matter and meaning’.

Which brings us to the book’s final intervention, which concerns the persistent question of sexual difference. Reading Luce Irigaray’s theory of sexual difference as ontology through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Kirby continues a long-standing engagement with one of feminist theory’s foundational issues. Kirby notes Irigaray’s theory is keen to align the feminine with openness, which is in turn read as a kind of generosity towards others and otherness. Closure, then, takes on a negative or immoral hue. As Kirby argues, Irigaray’s understanding of materiality as something that gives but ‘is not itself given because it is the given’ requires the feminine as difference to be ‘[a] pure, isolated, virgin birth’ (p. 130, emphasis in original). This ‘given’ can only be disturbed or broken from the outside: the primordial given is feminine, and that which breaks open this given is masculine. The scene of this violent rupture is the sexual encounter between the feminine and masculine, with the masculine as perpetrator. For Irigaray, then, nature (feminine) is fractured by culture (masculine) in man’s attempt to sever its creation by and dependence upon nature. As such, Kirby argues, within Irigaray’s philosophy, the dispersal of this violent fracturing means that ‘the entire universe is essentially at fault’ (p. 134). Against this, Kirby reads Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception as independent of a self that must precede its perceiving. Returning to Barad’s theory of entanglement, Kirby argues that any positioning of some sort of primordial self – here sexual difference – is actually always already ‘in the process of becoming itself’ (p. 121). Following a philosophy of entanglement, in which culture and nature are not (and never were) separate, leads Kirby to reject Irigaray’s inclination to hold all culture (masculine) accountable. Instead, Kirby considers an ethics of responsibility through Merleau-Ponty, suggesting ‘the realization that culpability cannot be attributed to any one, that it has no simple origin or cause, brings a more forgiving and generous sense of understanding to our adjudications, albeit one that will continue to concern us even after our political decisions have been made’ (p. 121, emphasis in original). Without, in other words, an ontology of separation (feminine and masculine), no one is to blame. For Kirby, difference is rather ‘an expression of the intra-ontology of Being itself’ (p. 136); alterity does not encounter being from some external position. The consequence of this ‘intra-ontology’ is that any given so-called being – my self – is ‘more than local’ (p. 136).

Quantum Anthropologies will generate much discussion. If culture and nature are not, and never have been separate, why does the book persist with these terms? And what about the question of stability? Sexual difference theorists (see Grosz, 2011 for instance) argue that while sexual difference may not have always been on the scene, once it took evolutionary hold, it has remained stable for millennia. Regardless of one’s position vis-à-vis sexual difference as ontology, how does an entangled ‘intra-ontology of Being’ understand stasis in a broader sense?

In sum, Quantum Anthropologies is a tour de force, and a must-read for anyone serious about gender theory, materialism, poststructuralism and/or cultural theory as well as emerging re-considerations of feminist standpoint theory, sexual difference theory and feminist theories of the inhuman. Kirby demonstrates a breadth of knowledge that does not in the least compromise her thorough textual engagement. The book provides ample springboards for enriched conversations between empirically and theoretically oriented research, materialism and cultural theory, representationalism and realism – as internally heterogeneous as any of these approaches are.